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South Korea’s attempt to Legitimize the Blockchain

By the end of July, South Korea might have jumped ahead of the United States in a big way.

According to a report by Cointelegraph, which was generated from an original article by BChain, three South Korean governmental departments are working on a new regulatory framework for the Blockchain space that aims to legitimize it.

In truth, this appears to mean that they aim to legitimize it enough to easily regulate it just as governments regulate any other existing industry.

Even so, how they plan to structure such a framework is actually quite telling, especially for countries like the United States, which have cited the difficulty of classifying the space to promote regulation.

To begin, areas of the industry that will be covered include: blockchain systems construction, decentralized applications development, and cryptocurrency exchanges and transactions, according to Cointelegraph.

How it defines online cryptocurrency exchanges is particularly telling.

Reportedly, the latest version of the report that will contain the future framework calls cryptocurrency exchanges crypto asset exchanges and brokerages. According to an article by Hacked, this means that they can easily be defined as regulated institutions because the terms that are used serve as a guide for how to treat them in the financial space.

In essence, this definition means that regulators should look over cryptocurrency exchanges in the same way as they do traditional asset exchanges and brokerages, except they should also keep in mind that what these institutions trade is crypto-assets.

In this way as well, instead of branding them as cryptocurrencies, which have never been regulated before, this report has branded them as simply a new asset class.

Overarching all of this is the apparent fact that South Korea, up to this point, has not done any sort of large-scale, statistical survey of the Blockchain sector. The entire report will be statistically driven and will apparently cover three major parts of the industry with ten sub-categories as well.

Included in this is the integration of Blockchain systems into traditional industries like the security industries, the financial industry, the insurance industry, and the medical services industry.

While Cointelegraph posits that these efforts have largely been spurred on by recent hacks in the space, one can only hope that part of the motivation is because of the success of legitimate Blockchain projects, globally.

If the United States could follow South Korea’s example, then we just might see a calmer response to the Blockchain’s rise than we are seeing now, in connection with clear tax laws on the subject.